This is the kind of thing that I would like to make an explicit skill in catching. I think it is the instrumental rationality analog to the epistemic rationality skill of noticing when you flinch away from a thought.
It’s certainly a worthwhile skill. (Probably more important for most practical purposes than all that ‘epistemic’ stuff.) It may be best to develop the skill in a somewhat original-cause agnostic fashion. It is somewhat hard to trace the exact cause of a particular instance of aversion to “aversion to spending glucose on thought” vs “aversion to spending glucose on doing stuff in general”. Yet often the reasoning we use to bypass those biases and do the smart thing anyway is the same regardless.
(If I don’t base my skills entirely upon my just-so stories it means I don’t necessarily have to abandon them if it turns out my history was wrong but practical psychology was not.)
It’s certainly a worthwhile skill. (Probably more important for most practical purposes than all that ‘epistemic’ stuff.) It may be best to develop the skill in a somewhat original-cause agnostic fashion. It is somewhat hard to trace the exact cause of a particular instance of aversion to “aversion to spending glucose on thought” vs “aversion to spending glucose on doing stuff in general”. Yet often the reasoning we use to bypass those biases and do the smart thing anyway is the same regardless.
(If I don’t base my skills entirely upon my just-so stories it means I don’t necessarily have to abandon them if it turns out my history was wrong but practical psychology was not.)